When we see records being broken and unprecedented events such as this, the onus is on those who deny any connection to climate change to prove their case. Global warming has fundamentally altered the background conditions that give rise to all weather. In the strictest sense, all weather is now connected to climate change. Kevin Trenberth

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Friday, February 28, 2014

In recent years, Roundup was found to be even more toxic than it was when first approved for agricultural use, though that discovery has not led to any changes in regulation of the pesticide. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Roundup herbicide, Monsanto’s flagship weed killer, was present in 75% of air and rainfall test samples, according to the study, which focused on Mississippi’s highly fertile Delta agricultural region.

GreenMedInfo reports new research, soon to be published by Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry journal, discovered the traces over the 12-year span 1995-2007.

In recent years, Roundup was found to be even more toxic than it was when first approved for agricultural use, though that discovery has not led to any changes in regulation of the pesticide. Moreover, Roundup’s overuse has enabled weeds and insects to build an immunity to its harsh toxins.

To deal with the immunity issue, Monsanto’s solution has been to spray more and stronger pesticides to eliminate the problem.

The health effects of Roundup are also hard to ignore as research has linked exposure to the pesticide to Parkinson’s disease and various cancers.

For instance, children in Argentina, where Roundup is used in high concentrations, struggle with health problems, with 80% showing signs of the toxins in their bloodstreams.

However, Roundup isn’t the only widespread threat to public health. The U.S. Geological Survey, along with others, have identified additional pesticides in the air and water that become more toxic as they mix and come in contact with people.

Spraying Roundup may have short-term economic benefits for Monsanto, but the potential long-term risks could present significant challenges to people in affected regions of the country.

Visit EcoWatch’s FOOD and HEALTH pages for more related news on this topic.

Pundit George Will embraced his anti-truth nature when he jumped from ABC to Fox News last year. If only he had jumped from Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post to Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

But Bezos, the founder of Amazon — a company built around technology and hard-nosed accounting — must be accountable for the unadulterated anti-science nonsense of his columnists. Charles Krauthammer published his umpteenth falsehood-fest last week. In a debunking, climatologist Michael Mann notes his “laundry list of shopworn talking points [is] so predictable now in climate change denialist lore that one can make a drinking game out of it.”

No wonder “97 percent” — who did the poll? — of climate scientists agree. When a Nazi publishing company produced “100 Authors Against Einstein,” the target of this argument-by-cumulation replied: “Were I wrong, one professor would have been quite enough.”

Yes, Will believes the community of climate scientists warning the public about the dangers of unrestricted carbon pollution is analogous to Nazi attacks on Albert Einstein. This is apparently a whole new messaging strategy for the deniers. Last week, Roy Spencer announced that from now on he will refer to many politicians and scientists as “global warming Nazis.”

Of course Will can’t be bothered to use Google to find out that the “poll” is actually a peer-reviewed analysis of more than 1,000 recent scientific papers on climate science.

For Will, like John Christy, there is no greater proof scientists are wrong than when they commit the cardinal sin of agreeing with each other. He writes:

Obama says, “The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.” When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.

Well, as the AP reported in September, “Top scientists from a variety of fields say they are about as certain that global warming is a real, man-made threat as they are that cigarettes kill.”

So I guess we better remove all those Surgeon General warnings from cigarette packs, since scientists are just too collectively over-confident about the dangers of smoking for them to actually be right.

Will has the chutzpah to sneer:

Secretary of State John Kerry, our knight of the mournful countenance, was especially apocalyptic recently when warning that climate change is a “weapon of mass destruction.” Like Iraq’s?

Let’s go back to October 2003, when Will wrote a column defending our Iraqi war policy — despite our inability to actually find WMDs. He argued that some actions must be taken with incomplete knowledge:

How much certainty is requisite as a basis for action depends in part on the consequences of being wrong.

Yet we had no idea what the likelihood of being right about WMDs was, nor, truthfully, what the consequences of being wrong about WMDs in Iraq were (since even if Saddam had them, we don’t know if he would ever have used them against us).

The tragedy here is that the likelihood the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are right is exceedingly high — and we know the consequences of Will being wrong about climate change are a century or more of needless misery for billions of people. That would constitute the basis for action if Will had any intellectual consistency.

But then that 2003 column was titled “Right Man, Right Job” and was a defense of … wait for it … Donald Rumsfeld. In punditry — unlike in climate policy — there is never any consequence for being catastrophically wrong. Indeed, Will has been so blatantly wrong about climate change for so long that back in 2009, two Washington Post reporters took the unprecedented step of contradicting him in a news article.

The Washington Post’s recent track record on climate change is indefensible. Last year, they removed their top climate reporter, Juliet Eilperin, from the environment beat, and their coverage of climate change dropped by one third.

Then in January, the Post dropped star blogger Ezra Klein — one of their only consistent sources of science-based coverage of climate change — and added the climate confusionist blog Volokh Conspiracy. And now their top conservative columnists have declared open season on climate science.

The Amazon rainforest’s dry season is 3 weeks longer now than it was 30 years ago. And experts worry that the Amazon could be devastated by drought and extreme weather if we stay on our current CO2 emissions pathway.

The guy who runs the other Amazon needs to stop letting his newspaper be a source of misinformation and confusion. Otherwise it will be a legacy he and the original Amazon may never recover from.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

As the national media puts the spotlight on the “FrackGate” public relations scandal in Ohio, where state officials worked to “marginalize opponents of fracking by teaming up with corporations—including Halliburton—business groups and media outlets,” Illinois residents behind a ballot initiative to ban fracking in rural Johnson County are facing a similar campaign of misinformation and local news blackout.

It’s bad enough that Illinois’ flawed state fracking regulations have spiraled into a widely denounced phase of disarray and confusion.

Two of the three Johnson County commissioners, in fact, had encouraged residents last fall to draw up their own “simple” ballot initiative to gauge the “will of the people.”

Sounds reasonable and democratic, no?

But now, with the same local citizens group’s non-binding ballot initiative gaining widespread support across the county from residents especially concerned about the threat of involuntary “forced pooling” from neighboring leases, theVienna Times/Goreville Gazettehas suddenly announced—according to local residents—a new policy to refuse all anti-fracking ads, letters to the editor or news releases, even as it accepts ads and press releases from an Orwellian campaign set up to dismiss the community rights-driven campaign against absentee fracking corporations as a “radical agenda of out-of-state interests.”

Since when are local farmers called “out-of-state” and absentee fracking corporations considered homeboys?

And since when has this ad become too dangerous for the Vienna Times?

Instead, featuring Shawnee Professional Services president Mitch Garrett and Johnson County Commissioner Ernie Henshaw—who had originally voted for the one-year moratorium and asked for public input—the Vienna Times/Goreville Gazette celebrated the kick-off of an opposition group to the county citizens initiative on its front page this week, and included an ad with a direct link to opposition’s Facebook page:

Two years ago, Vienna Times publisher Lonnie Hinton and Shawnee Professional

Service owner Mitch Garrett worked together on another hot issue: Ridding the town of stray cats.And now, what about what the fracking cats about about to drag in? As in debunked and clearly exaggerated job promises, and the onslaught of the well-documented fracking reality of industrial traffic, workplace accidents and injuries, massive amounts of pollution and toxic discharges risking public health and potential earthquakes?“I’ve never quite grasped how much power the oil and gas industry has until now. What they are doing to manipulate the vote makes me angry and sad. And, what industry has not begun to understand is that there are plenty of us, and more all the time who will never, never give up,” said Annette McMichaels, communications director for the Southern Illinoisans Against Fracturing Our Environment citizens groups, and a resident and landowner in Johnson County.“The best way to have discussion is in open dialogue, solved in an equal and democratic fashion,” said Johnson County vegetable farmer Kris Pirmann, who is active in the community rights ballot initiative. “Open discourse is the only legitimate and democratic way, and shutting down one side is not open discourse.”Not so, says the local media. The Vienna Times/Goreville Gazette failed to answer multiple queries about its new policies. But local residents noted a new sign at the newspaper office, with a warning signed by Vienna Times publisher Hinton: “We reserve the right to accept or reject material submitted for publication, including letters to the editor, news releases and advertising.”Here’s the ballot initiative, drawn up by local Johnson County residents and southern Illinois native and resident Natalie Long, a community organizer with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund:

“Shall the people’s right to local self-government be asserted by Johnson County to ban corporate fracking as a violation of their rights to health, safety, and a clean environment?”

“This ballot initiative is led by a local group of people of common concerns, Johnson County resident, many who are third or fourth generation farmers,” said Pirmann, the Johnson County vegetable farmer, who noted that more than 1,000 county residents signed a petition for the ballot. “The argument that this initiative is hijacked from the outside doesn’t hold any water.”

Long adds: “A Community Bill of Rights is a community-tailored document. It’s made up of two main parts: (1) a section that asserts the rights of the community, including the right to local self-governance, the right to clean air, and the right to clean water; and (2) an enumeration of activities that violate those rights, and therefore are prohibited in the community. Because a Community Bill of Rights is drafted with each particular community, that means that no two documents are the same. Instead, they reflect the priorities of the community. In this case, Johnson County citizens are hard at working crafting language that focuses specifically on prohibiting hydraulic fracturing—nothing else. Any claim otherwise is both misguided and false.”

Only days away from the March 18th ballot vote, Johnson County residents are not giving up on the local news media black out, or the political games from out-of-state industry sycophants. Redoubling their efforts, Johnson County residents are stepping up grassroots efforts and seeking funds to place the ads in regional newspapers.

“It appears we don’t have avenue to voice our concerns,” Pirmann said. “They just want us to be quiet and go away. But we’re Johnson County residents and we’re going to talk to Johnson County residents face-to-face, in a democratic fashion, and voice our opinions to protect our land and farms.”

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

A page from a GCHQ top secret document prepared by its secretive JTRIG unit

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:

Other tactics aimed at individuals are listed here, under the revealing title “discredit a target”:

Then there are the tactics used to destroy companies the agency targets:

GCHQ describes the purpose of JTRIG in starkly clear terms: “using online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world,” including “information ops (influence or disruption).”

Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism,” meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends.

The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:

No matter your views on Anonymous, “hacktivists” or garden-variety criminals, it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption. There is a strong argument to make, as Jay Leiderman demonstrated in The Guardianin the context of the Paypal 14 hacktivist persecution, that the “denial of service” tactics used by hacktivists result in (at most) trivial damage (far less than the cyber-warfare tactics favored by the US and UK) and are far more akin to the type of political protest protected by the First Amendment.

The broader point is that, far beyond hacktivists, these surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats. As Anonymous expert Gabriella Coleman of McGill University told me, “targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs, resulting in the stifling of legitimate dissent.” Pointing to this study she published, Professor Coleman vehemently contested the assertion that “there is anything terrorist/violent in their actions.”

Government plans to monitor and influence internet communications, and covertly infiltrate online communities in order to sow dissension and disseminate false information, have long been the source of speculation. Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-“independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups.

Sunstein also proposed sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” which spread what he views as false and damaging “conspiracy theories” about the government. Ironically, the very same Sunstein was recently named by Obama to serve as a member of the NSA review panel created by the White House, one that – while disputing key NSA claims – proceeded to propose many cosmetic reforms to the agency’s powers (most of which were ignored by the President who appointed them).

But these GCHQ documents are the first to prove that a major western government is using some of the most controversial techniques to disseminate deception online and harm the reputations of targets. Under the tactics they use, the state is deliberately spreading lies on the internet about whichever individuals it targets, including the use of what GCHQ itself calls “false flag operations” and emails to people’s families and friends. Who would possibly trust a government to exercise these powers at all, let alone do so in secret, with virtually no oversight, and outside of any cognizable legal framework?

Then there is the use of psychology and other social sciences to not only understand, but shape and control, how online activism and discourse unfolds. Today’s newly published document touts the work of GCHQ’s “Human Science Operations Cell,” devoted to “online human intelligence” and “strategic influence and disruption”:

Under the title “Online Covert Action,” the document details a variety of means to engage in “influence and info ops” as well as “disruption and computer net attack,” while dissecting how human beings can be manipulated using “leaders,” “trust,” “obedience” and “compliance”:

The documents lay out theories of how humans interact with one another, particularly online, and then attempt to identify ways to influence the outcomes – or “game” it:

We submitted numerous questions to GCHQ, including: (1) Does GCHQ in fact engage in “false flag operations” where material is posted to the Internet and falsely attributed to someone else?; (2) Does GCHQ engage in efforts to influence or manipulate political discourse online?; and (3) Does GCHQ’s mandate include targeting common criminals (such as boiler room operators), or only foreign threats?

As usual, they ignored those questions and opted instead to send their vague and nonresponsive boilerplate: “It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters. Furthermore, all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All our operational processes rigorously support this position.”

These agencies’ refusal to “comment on intelligence matters” – meaning: talk at all about anything and everything they do – is precisely why whistleblowing is so urgent, the journalism that supports it so clearly in the public interest, and the increasingly unhinged attacks by these agencies so easy to understand. Claims that government agencies are infiltrating online communities and engaging in “false flag operations” to discredit targets are often dismissed as conspiracy theories, but these documents leave no doubt they are doing precisely that.

Whatever else is true, no government should be able to engage in these tactics: what justification is there for having government agencies target people – who have been charged with no crime – for reputation-destruction, infiltrate online political communities, and develop techniques for manipulating online discourse? But to allow those actions with no public knowledge or accountability is particularly unjustifiable.

I first interviewed Dr. Alun Hubbard on the edge of the Watson River in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland last summer. His vivid language and lucid storytelling made that video on of the most popular in the Yale Series (see below).

Both Dr. Hubbard, and my Dark Snow Project cohort, Sara Penrhyn Jones, live in the tiny village of Aberystwyth, on the coast of Wales, and teach at the local university. I skyped with Alun a week or so ago in the midst of the storms hammering the area. Shortly after that he wrote me to explain that his roof had just blown off in hurricane force winds.

Sara was kind enough to shoot some video of the surf pounding the area, although not at the height of the storms, and she caught up with Hubbard long enough for a colorful and well-informed take on a seminal weather event.

I’ll cut together some of Alun's further remarks that did not make this video in the next day or so – see Hubbard’s Greenland interview below:

The sudden cooling of Europe, triggered by collapse of the global thermohaline circulation in the north Atlantic and the slowing of the Gulf Stream has been popularized by the movies and the media. The southern half of the global thermohaline circulation is as important to global climate but has not been popularized. The global oceans' coldest water, Antarctic bottom water forms in several key spots around Antarctica. The water is so cold and dense that it spreads out along the bottom all of the major ocean basins except the north Atlantic and Arctic. Multiple recent reports provide strong evidence that the formation of Antarctic bottom water has slowed dramatically in response to massive subsurface melting of ice shelves and glaciers. The meltwater is freshening a layer of water found between depths of 50 and 150 meters. This lightened layer is impeding the formation of Antarctic bottom water, causing the Antarctic half of the global thermohaline circulation to falter.

Update from the comments

I have been asked what's going to happen in response to the faltering of the thermohaline circulation around Antarctica. This post is based on a synthesis of very recent research reports. The key report, that found the layer of fresh water between 50 and 150 meters deep, was just published. Deward Hastings explained, in a comment, how disruptive this lens of freshened water could be to the earth's climate system and our models of it:

it IS complicated, and confusing

That lens of (relatively) fresh water that is forming around Antarctica is challenging, and changing, almost everything in global circulation patterns. It freezes sooner (and at a higher temperature). That shields the water from the wind, and reduces wind-driven mixing. It reduces, perhaps to the point of stopping altogether, the present global ocean circulation patterns. That in turn will change global atmospheric weather.

Nobody knows exactly what comes next. We've never seen it happen, and our models, not terribly accurate in describing the world we know, are completely untested in the coming world that we don't know.

Without a constant flow of cold water from the poles the Abyss will warm . . . and without cold slowly rising from the Abyss the mid-ocean and ocean surface will warm (already happening). That will lead to more evaporation (driving a different haline circulation in the tropics) and stronger tropical winds driving different surface currents and greater mixing.

Pretty much everything changes as a result . . . pretty much everywhere. After it's all over some places will have it better and some worse. While it's changing everywhere will be worse, because there is no way to know what to expect (except that it won't be what you've prepared for).

The best guesses we can make now about the effects of this melt layer are based on paleoclimatology research. Possible effects, based on paleoclimatology studies, are presented in the last few paragraphs. The results of these new studies will be challenging climate modelers for many years.

Sea ice extent has been increasing around Antarctica. In September 2012, while Arctic sea ice was at record low levels,Antarctic sea ice extent hit a record high. Climate skeptics jumped on the Antarctic record as evidence of cooling, while sea ice researchers blamed it on the wind.

Since the start of the satellite record, total Antarctic sea ice has increased by about 1% per decade. Whether the small overall increase in sea ice extent is a sign of meaningful change in the Antarctic is uncertain because ice extents in the Southern Hemisphere vary considerably from year to year and from place to place around the continent. Considered individually, only the Ross Sea sector had a significant positive trend, while sea ice extent has actually decreased in the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas. In short, Antarctic sea ice shows a small positive trend, but large scale variations make the trend very noisy.

NSIDC scientist Ted Scambos said, "Antarctica's changes—in winter, in the sea ice—are due more to wind than to warmth, because the warming does not take much of the sea ice area above the freezing point during winter. Instead, the winds that blow around the continent, the "westerlies," have gotten stronger in response to a stubbornly cold continent, and the warming ocean and land to the north."

Several recent reports, however, paint a more complex and disturbing picture where the intensifying winds are speeding up below surface currents bringing more above freezing water in contact with deep ice around Antarctica. Twenty of the ice shelves and many of the glaciers that feed them are melting from below.

The melting from below is creating a layer of relatively fresh water 50-150 meters below the surface around Antarctica. This layer of light fresh water is floating above a salty layer below. When ice forms at the surface in the Antarctic winter it creates cold dense salty water that tends to sink to the bottom, forming bottom water. However, this layer of light melt water is tending to block the water in the top 50 meters from sinking. The area of Antarctic sea ice has expanded because the layer of cold water has stayed on top and expanded outwards instead of sinking. Melting from below has created 2 stratified cold layers in the top 150 meters.

Note the bright pink area in the top 25 meters between 65° and 70° S. This top layer is becoming more saline. Brine is rejected from ice when sea ice forms. It isn't sinking because it is ponding above a freshening layer located at depths between 50 and 150 meters.

The freshened water column around Antarctica has become more stable between depths of 100 and 150 meters. This increasing stability is impeding the formation of Antarctic bottom water. Water that does sink is freshened through incorporation of glacial melt water.

Analysis of potential temperatures, which are temperatures adjusted for the effects of increasing pressure with depth, shows the surface water in the top hundred meters is cooling over a vast area from 40° S to 80° S while the water in that vast area below 150 meters is warming.

These results show a trend towards reversal of vertical motions around Antarctica. Intermediate water is welling up around Antarctic melting ice form below creating a freshened layer. Strengthening winds are blowing the cold surface water away from Antarctica. Bottom water formation, caused by the sinking of cold salty water formed by brine rejection, is declining.

...we find that all deep water masses in the Weddell Sea have been continually growing older and getting less ventilated during the last 27 years. The decline of the ventilation rate of Weddell Sea Bottom Water (WSBW) and Weddell Sea Deep Water (WSDW) along the Prime Meridian is in the order of 15–21%; the Warm Deep Water (WDW) ventilation rate declined much faster by 33%. About 88–94% of the age increase in WSBW near its source regions (1.8–2.4 years per year) is explained by the age increase of WDW (4.5 years per year). As a consequence of the aging, the anthropogenic Carbon increase in the deep and bottom water formed in the Weddell Sea slowed down by 14–21% over the period of observations.

The decline in Antarctic bottom water formation, combined with the southward expansion of warm subtropical water in the south Pacific and south Indian oceans has led to the rapid heating of intermediate and deep ocean water in the southern hemisphere.

Figure: Ocean Heat Content from 0 to 300 meters (grey), 700 m (blue), and total depth (violet) from ORAS4, as represented by its 5 ensemble members. The time series show monthly anomalies smoothed with a 12-month running mean, with respect to the 1958–1965 base period. Hatching extends over the range of the ensemble members and hence the spread gives a measure of the uncertainty as represented by ORAS4 (which does not cover all sources of uncertainty). The vertical colored bars indicate a two year interval following the volcanic eruptions with a 6 month lead (owing to the 12-month running mean), and the 1997–98 El Niño event again with 6 months on either side. On lower right, the linear slope for a set of global heating rates (W/m2) is given.

• Completely contrary to the popular contrarian myth, global warming has accelerated, with more overall global warming in the past 15 years than the prior 15 years. This is because about 90% of overall global warming goes into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically.

• As suspected, much of the 'missing heat' Kevin Trenberth previously talked about has been found in the deep oceans. Consistent with the results of Nuccitelli et al. (2012), this study finds that 30% of the ocean warming over the past decade has occurred in the deeper oceans below 700 meters, which they note is unprecedented over at least the past half century.

Observed temperature trends in the Indian Ocean present complex patterns that cannot be explained by surface heating alone. The heat storage has apparently increased more in the southern part than in the northern part of the Indian Ocean (Levitus et al., 2005), although this result may be biased by the sparse data coverage, particularly in the south (Harrison & Carson, 2007). The strongest warming is found near the subtropical front and extends as deep as 800 m; it is not directly linked to surface heating but rather due to a southward shift of the oceanic gyre circulation and associated thermal structure (Alory et al., 2007).

A statistically significant reduction in Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) volume is quantified between the 1980s and 2000s within the Southern Ocean and along the bottom-most, southern branches of the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC). AABW has warmed globally during that time, contributing roughly 10% of the recent total ocean heat uptake. This warming implies a global-scale contraction of AABW.

Rates of change in AABW-related circulation are estimated in most of the world’s deepocean basins by finding average rates of volume loss or gain below cold, deep potential temperature (θ) surfaces using all available repeated hydrographic sections. TheSouthern Ocean is losing water below θ = 0 °C at a rate of -8.2 (±2.6) × 106 m3/s.

The budget calculations and global contraction pattern are consistent with a global scale slowdown of the bottom, southern limb of the MOC.

The slowdown of the southern branch of the thermohaline circulation and the cooling of the surface waters close to Antarctica are enhancing the thermal gradient from the tropics to the pole, speeding up the winds in the southern hemisphere. These increases in wind speeds are likely increasing the flow of water from the Pacific to the Atlantic ocean, enhancing the northward flow of water, salt and heat from the south to the north Atlantic. Moreover, the southward movement of the subtropical front allows more flow of the Agulhas current around the south African capes from the Indian ocean to the south Atlantic.

Thus, increased melting of Arctic sea ice may be related to declines in Antarctic bottom water formation. Likewise, the cool Pacific, warm Atlantic pattern causing increased U.S. droughts and storminess in the north Atlantic may be tied to these changes in ocean circulation patterns. Paleoclimate studies have consistently shown oscillations between Antarctic and north Atlantic bottom water formation and between relative coolness around Antarctica and north Atlantic warmth.

The Arctic melt down that is far exceeding model predictions is connected to the slow down in Antarctic bottom water formation. Climate modelers will be challenged to model the connections and the details. The cooling waters around Antarctica, while apparently good news, are not. The rapid melting of the Arctic will be enhanced.